


Untouched/Untouching

by meltokio



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-09
Updated: 2017-05-09
Packaged: 2018-10-29 21:40:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10862634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meltokio/pseuds/meltokio
Summary: How do you tell people you’re in love with a statue?





	Untouched/Untouching

How do you tell people you’re in love with a statue?

You don’t, Armin decides. You keep it deep within you, untouched and untouching. You don’t bother explaining that she wasn’t always in that crystal. She had been a real girl once. A real girl with gray-blue eyes that were sleepy and sharp all at once. A real girl with a mean right hook and a million secrets. A real girl who could turn into a monster at will and kill as if she were born to do it.

She’d haunted his dreams; peering down at him through a thicket of golden hair and giving him the gift of life. He’d slammed his fist into the impenetrable mineral casing, shouting questions at her. Why hadn’t she killed him? Why did he deserve to live while Levi’s squad had been annihilated? Why had she been so particular about checking beneath the hoods—putting herself in danger for the sake of being sure?

That had to have been her human side. The side that’d managed to take his attention from menial tasks during training. The face that she’d kept hidden like the dark side of the moon; veiled in favor of guarded mystery.

Someone told him—he can’t remember now, after seven years had passed—that she’d cried when she’d surrendered. He could only remember the sound of her laugh: terrible and scared and beautiful. Like loud, discordant music. The sound of angels singing songs of destruction. It had given him chills. Thinking about it now sends goosebumps up his arms.

Annie Leonhardt has not aged a day since she wrapped herself in her crystal prison. Armin Arlert has. He’s grown a handful of inches, let his hair fall to his shoulders, shed his baby face, and watched in awe as muscles wrapped around his slim frame. Years etched themselves onto brow, weighed down his shoulders.

One thing has not changed, though. Annie remains the forefront of his attention.

Sometimes he visits her at daybreak when the sun climbs over the mountains in the east and casts light on her multifaceted diamond, sending rainbow beams in all directions. He’s often in awe how something that meant death to so many can be so beautiful.

How do you tell someone she’s beautiful when she’s been dead for seven years?

Squad Leader Zoe hypothesized that she had been placed in a sort of vegetative state—metabolism slowed to a complete stop. It would explain the lack of aging, hair or nail growth. The other scientists that were brought in to theorize put forth that she was dead and embalmed in organic matter akin to amber. One even went as far to say that she had been “fossilized”. Armin remembered disgust rising like bile in his throat, swallowing his pride and bidding the experts a curt farewell.

Annie’s crystal is refracting pink light across the courtyard, tendrils of pale rose creeping up his boots and onto his khakis. Reaching up like fingers to his chest and closing around his heart. Something between ritual and longing draws him closer to her monument. He presses his forehead against the cool surface, looks hard into her serene face—still seventeen and awash in the quiet sadness of fresh snowfall. She looks more peaceful now than he’s ever seen her, but he still remembers her anguish.

Looking at her is like looking into his past. Their snippets of conversation; bits and pieces of truth buried in layers of lies. Layers that wouldn’t even matter to him anymore so long as she woke up.

When she woke up.

If she woke up.

“I shouldn’t be in love with you,” he whispers against her coffin. “Please let me go.”


End file.
